I Don’t Think Obamacare Means What You Think It Means

When we first started talking aboot health care reform, a friend of mine who works for a retail chain express concern aboot what ObamaCare was going to do to his current plan. He falls into the 70+% of America who are happy with what he has, especially in his case where the company picks up for 90%, but knowing what the Democrat party has been planning on doing to the health care industry, he was worried.

Thankfully, our Dear Leader came along to assure us that his plan will benefit everyone who already has health insurance, and also that his plan will not add to the nation’s yawning budget deficit, which makes you wonder how you add a trillion dollars of new entitlement spending without increasing the deficit, but since Congress recently passed a law making it illegal to call the President a liar…we’ll just let it go.

What I find confusing is how this plan manages to not only NOT to what the President says it will, but takes the parts of insurance that people don’t like and injects in with anabolic steroids. From the Wall Street Journal…

With 30 million to 40 million newly insured persons under the administration’s plan, aggregate health-care demand will increase significantly. But when demand expands prices increase. We estimate that the higher demand will increase health insurance premiums for the typical family plan by about 10%. Because an employer-sponsored family insurance plan cost $12,680 in 2008, this translates into an increase of about $1,200 in the typical annual premium.

The mandates will also have adverse additional longer-run consequences. According to provisions in both House and Senate bills, mandated plans must have low copayments and provide coverage of health-care services that is at least equal in scope to a typical, current employer-sponsored plan. But these are the very flaws that are responsible for high and rising health-care costs, flaws that stem directly from the misguided tax exclusion for and the extensive state regulation of health insurance. By locking in these flaws, the mandates will inhibit precisely the innovation needed to reform U.S. health care. Ultimately, as government seeks to rein in costs, it will curtail access to health-care services by erecting barriers between patient and health-care provider.

The current House and Senate bills will also break the president’s second promise—not to add to the deficit. In part because the health insurance that the administration’s plan forces people to buy is expensive, the plan proposes to give individuals large financial subsidies to partially offset the cost. The entitlement-based subsidy, combined with the proposed Medicaid expansion, would add between $700 billon and $1.2 trillion to federal spending over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The new entitlements would come on top of existing federal health-care entitlements that the government has been neither able to control nor finance.